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London 2012: Leisel Jones proves no one flukes their way into the Olympics

LONDON — There are times when doing this job makes you more than a little ashamed.

After swimming her first heat here on Sunday, Australian Leisel Jones — an eight-time Olympic medallist who has been labelled a fatty by papers back home — was brought out to meet the press, trembling slightly.

Other swimmers come out in their skivvies, all long levers and lazy physical confidence. Packed into her full-body racing sleeve, there wasn’t a single bulge on Jones. Nevertheless, she stood back, protectively clutching a folded warm-up jacket in front of her stomach.

No one wanted to ask her about those photos. But someone had to, elliptically.

“How are you feeling?” someone finally tried. “Mentally.”

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Jones took a very deep breath and waded in.

“Look. I’ve been around this game for about 12 years. I’m not shocked by anything. I guess it’s pretty hurtful coming from your own country, people making comments like that.”

All the guys from her own country on the other side of the barrier looked down at the ground for a moment. Abashed, if not quite ashamed.

Jones is chubby by the standards of her professional world. Olive Oyl is a little chubby by the standards of that world. By those same standards, I’m a sphere.

Up close, the 26-year-old is a specimen. All shoulders, tapering down into infinity.

If she is fleshier than her competitors, she’s also a lot better at swimming than most of those “good body” types, to use a baseball term of art.

On Sunday, she comfortably advanced to the finals of the 100-metre breaststroke, an event in which she holds the Olympic record.

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An athlete’s body is a tool. It has been custom-designed to perform a very specific task, not to look good in bathing suits.

Weightlifters are often fat. Plenty of wrestlers and shot-putters are too. They’re exactly as fat as they need to be. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. No one flukes their way into the Olympics.

This isn’t a beauty contest. It’s the other sort, the one with a clock.

“I swim in the pool,” Jones said, identifying the key point here, her voice shaking. “I don’t swim in the papers.”

All of this noise — both the pro and con — says a lot more about us than it does about Jones. We live in a world where a certain sort of person might proudly say, “I’ve been to prison” or “I don’t know anything about history,” but could never imagine themselves saying with “I’m overweight” with anything but shame.

There is no hope for those idiots making fun of Jones. There is also no point to those shrilly defending her. She is significantly heavier than most swimmers. Pretending she isn’t undermines the better two-pronged argument: “What she does in the pool is the only expression of her physical fitness. And more importantly, why does this matter so much to you?”

We once held Olympic athletes up as the exemplars of physical perfection. That notion has shifted to a look taken from Hollywood.

If you have ever seen a movie star up close, you know they don’t, as a rule, have great bodies. They have exceedingly small bodies and large heads (to accentuate that tininess everywhere else). They have been chosen (rather than designed) to look good on camera. There is only one way to look that way. There are a variety of ways to look good in the starting blocks.

“Extremely unfair,” Aussie chef Nick Green has said of the criticism of Jones. “Athletes come in different shapes and sizes.”

Our sudden, collective fascination with Jones’ waistline is an abstract concept up until you are standing in front of her. She was defiant (thank God). But the deep humiliation that plainly underlies that defiance made listening to her feel voyeuristic. How humiliated would you feel if your worst holiday snapshot were splashed across every flat, pulped surface on Earth? Whether it was fair or not, right or not, in defence or attack, you’d want to find a large box and climb inside for a while.

Given all that, Jones is remarkably poised. Olympically so. Facing the press, she said the smart thing.

“I’ve never had so much support in my life. I’m so thankful. Thanks to the journalists who decided to write not-so-nice comments about me. You have never made me feel so loved in my life.”

Jones made a point to take turns looking right in the eye of the men — all of them men — standing in front of her as she said that. Her lip was trembling. Her eyes were glassy.

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